Rain, Rain, Go Away

6 December, Monday; Mucenze, Rwanda. We had a much-needed break today with a day of no activities. Our gorilla trekking permits are dated for tomorrow, so we will wait here at the church mission where we are staying. The good news – another day of not having to pitch or take down tents since we are staying in dorms. The bad news – there isn’t much to do around here unless you want to spend a fortune. I spent the morning doing some laundry.

Later, we took a walk around the small downtown area.

After lunch, we were chilling out in the bar when all of the sudden, it started spitting rain. Since I’d just spent all this time this morning doing laundry by hand in little buckets, I was not about to let that hard work go to waste and have my clothes strewn about the lawn in the wet grass, so I quickly ran down and brought our clothes inside. It started raining harder and the ladies who’d been drying clothes were taking down theirs, so I took the cue and started grabbing some of the others’ clothes. We’d nearly made it back to the bar when it started down pouring. And when I say down pour, I mean DOWN POUR with hail. To make matters more interesting, the roofs here are tin, so the sound was crazy. Imagine a stadium full of people pounding on their chairs! We had to shout at each other, even though we were sitting a foot away from each other. Ben was perturbed that he didn’t have his camera on him so he braved the rain and ran to get his camera so he could capture the moment. Dinner this evening was out (yeah – no dishes!) at a very budget motel place downtown. It’s so funny how your standards start to evolve when travelling in an area like East Africa. The restaurant was a hole in the wall…almost literally. The walk on the way back was interesting since neither of us had flashlights and the terrain is rough (for an, um, road), though we all made it back safely. I was thinking how horrible it would have been to have fallen and sprained an ankle mere hours before doing the gorilla trek. I think Alanis would have called it ironic, though I cannot, as The Oatmeal would call that incorrect usage of the word.

No late night games tonight as we have to leave by 6:30am local time to start off on our Gorilla Trek. We’re all excited.